Great Books for Book Reports

If you’re in high school or college and need to write a book report or a research paper, here are some ideas to get you started.

In addition to the three short novels I suggested in this article, here’s a list of some more excellent books separated by subject.

A Life With Books:

• Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Read more about it in this article.
• The Reader by Bernhard Sclink
• Try this article about books and literature in general.

Characterization:

• American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Read more about it in this article. Read more about books with strong POV characters in this article.
• Anything by William Shakespeare. There’s an old joke that every character that Ernest Hemingway wrote was perfectly the quintessence of Hemingway. Shakespeare did everybody else.
• To read more about characterization in general, try this short article.

Jane Austen:

• Pride and Prejudice: Lively, vivacious Lizzy Bennet marries up, way up.
• Persuasion: The anti-P&P. Anne Elliot breaks up with the man she loves because he isn’t rich enough. Luckily, he gets rich and she gets him back. Read more about it in this article.
• Mansfield Park: Fanny, a poor relation, lives with her rich, rather insipid cousins and their lively but debauched friends, but is the best of them. She eventually marries the rich man she loves. Though Fanny is the most passive of Austen’s heroines, it is appropriate that she should be. This book also refutes the shallow premise of P&P. Its thesis is that it is better to be moral and live a good life than to be vivacious.
• This article, about fiction in general, might help you with your paper.

Forthcoming, controversial novels:

• Rabid by TK Kenyon (yep!) April, 2007. The evolution of religion. Science proves it: there is no God.
• The Game by Derek Armstrong. (April, 2007) Fiction book slays reality television.
• bang-BANG by Lynn Hoffman. (April, 2007) Sweet little waitress uses, then takes on guns.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling. (July 21, 2007) Will Harry die?

Thanks for reading,

TK Kenyon